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If you are a seafood lover and wish that you could eat more fish raised on pig feces, your dreams are coming true. Due to fierce competition in the Chinese tilapia industry, farmers are increasingly switching to feces instead of commercial feed. From the article: "At Chen Qiang’s tilapia farm in Yangjiang city in China’s Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, Chen feeds fish partly with feces from hundreds of pigs and geese. That practice is dangerous for American consumers, says Michael Doyle, director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety. 'The manure the Chinese use to feed fish is frequently contaminated with microbes like salmonella,' says Doyle, who has studied foodborne diseases in China."

Actually, i don't, providing that we -the consumers- are informed (like we are now), so we -the consumers- can choose if we want feces with our fish (i dont't mind so mutch, but i understand that it's a matter of taste) - way better than a non free market where your only option would be...

consumers are as much to blame. They vote with their wallets and they choose price before everything else repeatedly. It's not like the shitty quality of average junk from china was not known for decades, yet it still has no problem finding the buyers.

i agree that the precise characteristics of the product are unavailable, but it doesn't require a rocket scientist to read the ingredients from time to time (yet nobody does it) or to know that the junk food is made of junk and is bad for you or that the chinese crap == shitton of nasty pollution and no worker rights whatsoever pretty much by definition.Ignorance is a bliss and most people choose to be oblivious.

So we should all hire private investigators any time we want to try a new brand of food, or every other week to make sure that food companies are still making "the good stuff" in an ethical way?

People already do have the choice to buy dirt cheap stuff if they want. Just because the ingredients are on the packet doesn't mean that a lot of people won't chose based on price. I know that's what I did when I was a student. Now that I don't really need to care about the cost of food, I just base my choices on things like protein content and sugar content.

Because an international mega-corp would never lie to consumers, right? If you're under 40 you have probably never heard of the 'truth in packaging' laws, or the reasons why they exist. Things were bad enough that even the frelling Chamber of Commerce joined with consumers groups to lobby for the legislation.

If you're over 40 and still believe this libertardian garbage then your blinders are on so tight you're probably beyond hope. Not sure why you think that everyone can afford to contract with a lab to analyze their corn flakes to see if they're made with mercury or contain measurable amounts of pesticides. You must belong to a distinctly higher income class than the rest of us.

Reading the ingredients would not help in this case. Not that I'm convinced it's a bad thing anyway. If fish like eating shit and can survive on it, I don't really see the problem. Plants eat shit too.

It makes sense to you to get sick just because you know someone will pay for it? Really? Here in socialist Sweden, I know my bill will be paid for me, but we are all still pretty careful not to buy shit that will make us sick. Not because of the economic cost, but because being sick sucks!

Should they end up in an emergency room, your argument is still faulty since emergency care has been covered by the government for years and has nothing to do with Obama's health care bill.

What the hell are you talking about? The govt never covered emergency care. If you go to the ER and you don't have insurance, they're legally obligated to treat you, but you're still responsible for the bill.

I love how the moderators freak out when they can't find that "-1 Criticizes my ideology" mod so they just pick "Offtopic" or "Overrated" instead (when the post is neither).

In this case it's because there's no "-1 evil fuckbag" moderation option. If someone posted a long spiel about the joys of butt-raping 8 year old boys, or why Hitler was right about the Jews I would expect it to be modded down too.

I always find it amusing when serious Randian/"libertarian"/extreme rightwing free market cheerleaders are surprised that some of their ideas disgust people.

Yes, but the price is almost the only information consumers can base there decision on. That, and the packaging design.

How else are consumers supposed to decide if a bag of chicken is tastier than a different bag of chicken? Being pricier might be some indication that it is better in some way, but it certainly doesn't guarantee it. Brand name chicken is typically overpriced or as cheap as possible. The "organic" stuff might be good since it could be coming from people with higher standards, but people

When there's no other comprehensible information available, it's only natural they choose based on price first. The packages don't say fish raised on goose shit, now do they? In some cases, large producers have lobbied (with some success) to either prevent labeling food that avoids a controversial practice or they lobby for a definition that could apply to nearly anything sold as food including ground glass so they can slap the meaningless bullet point on their packages too.

Even brand name is now worthless information, much of it is just the cheap stuff re-badged and sold for more these days.

They buy quality/brand names when it matters or when they can afford it. If people only cared for the cheapest products available, there wouldn't quite be a market for organic free range cage free free trade products made without high fructose corn syrup. There wouldn't be such large lines for Apple products (ok this is more a case of status symbol but it doesn't take away from my point too much).

They buy quality/brand names when it matters or when they can afford it. If people only cared for the cheapest products available, there wouldn't quite be a market for organic free range cage free free trade products made without high fructose corn syrup.

First, the reputation of a brand name is indicative of the brand's value to consumers in the past. That value may continue today, or it may be subjected to some MBA "extract the value from the brand" type strategy - i.e. same shit as the others, but with a higher price and fatter profit margin. Shopping blindly by brand may be better than shopping blindly by price, but it's by no means guaranteed; without better product information, you're shopping blindly in both cases.

The mere existence of high end and quality products both food and otherwise show quite clearly that consumers DON'T choose price before everything. I see iPhones in peoples hands instead of cheap Huawei smartphones, 50" TVs from reputable brands in peoples homes rather than the likes of Palsonic, and at the local supermarket premium smoked salmon moves off the shelf quite quickly as do the fancy goat cheeses nice solid blocks of parmesan and gourmet sausages.

The free market requires that consumers must here about this, because the free market relies on an informed consumer. The free market is designed to drive the prices and profits down; that is the entire point of a free market - that multiple vendors compete for the patronage of consumers in a fair manner, by offering the best products for the most attractive price.

The free market is about freedom for corporations; to sell whatever crap they want, however they want. If corporations cannot maximise profit by colluding to artificially maintain high prices and low wages, then the market is clearly not free!

Pretty much every food item does have labelling on it saying where it was sourced from. Buying food coming out of China is basically nuts, just don't do it. I always check country of source and when it doubt about packed produce that is unclear I just avoid it. I do not buy any food coming out of China, I double wash all clothes in very hot water coming out off China prior to wearing (if the clothes wont tolerate that, then those types of clothes I source from more reliable locations). Buying food out of C

That's absurd, we are discussing it. We have heard about it and not from the government. That's not to say I'm against any and all regulation, but you can now that you know you can choose seafood from places with better standards. If you buy domestic rather than imported products you will know that your own countries standards apply.

The reason very few cultures eat the meat of carnivores is that the closer the physiology and biology of two animals, the higher the chance of the same micro-organisms infecting the two animals. I had to explain this to my mother once, to explain why cow dung is a good fertiliser, but cat shit should be kept out of the compost heap.

If you're going to farm an animal that can harbour parasites than can also infect humans, you need to go out of your way to ensure that they don't come into contact with those parasites.

That doesn't mean "don't feed them shit", but "be selective in which animals' shit you feed them". Which basically means ruminant shit.

Yes it probably will. It will cause customers who are worried to avoid Chinese sea food, might even put the producers or the importers out of business.

Looks what some of the contaminated vegetable scares have done to certain groups of farmers in our nation. They have driven them out of business and forced others to take elaborate measures to ensure and convince customers of the safety of their product.

With "openness" the market will do the job just fine. As long as people know where their sea food product

Goose shit is just disgusting. It's sorta green, sorta white, not really solid and all slimy and uck. I mean, can you imagine stepping into your garden to pick a tomato, and you get this slimy crap all over your clogs?

You can eat raw steer manure and live. (Well, at my farm you could, I would hesitate about CAFO waste.) Bird shit is chock-full of dangerous pathogens, you don't want the chicken coop anywhere near where the other critters live. Fresh air, sunlight, and happy composting organisms are used to convert nasty poop back into wholesome dirt that will grow safe edible food. Always wash your hands after you touch a bird. Wetlands- nasty, stinky swamps, are where water gets cleansed of pathogens and purified so that normal fish can live in it. Tilapia can live in warm, nasty water, but it would make them unsafe to eat.

Nobody said it was. If it's being harvested for you it's being made for you, even if the bees had other plans. This is true for everything you eat: nothing grows seeds, fruit, flesh or whatever with your appetite in mind.

And the thrust of the post that started this thread was other stuff besides. If you only want to talk about shit...well, I would have said move to another thread, but now I think of it talking about shit is what Slashdot is for, so never mind.

As to honey, that's not comparable at all. It's not a waste product, it's intended to be eaten, so there's an incentive for it to be clean.

The fish sea birds regurgitate for their chicks is intended to be eaten, and is therefore not a waste product. It would also make you very sick. Intended to be eaten does not equate to human ideas of edible, honey merely falls into both categories.

No...they make it by ingesting nectar, partially digesting it, and regurgitating it. Or, as SuperKendall put it, "throw[ing] up". It just so happens that we find bee vomit not only edible but delicious, unlike, say, cow cud or penguin puke, so we made up a special name for it (honey) that lets us eat it without thinking about where it comes from*. Call it "bee barf" and nobody would touch it, absence of bacteria notwithstanding.

*OK, we made up the name before we knew precisely how it was made. Still, the re

In the real world, animals are messy critters that eat a lot of stuff you would never eat yourself, some of which you would not survive eating.

In the end it's a good reason to wash and cook food properly before eating, but not necessarily something to panic over, even practices that sounds as odd as this.

What is manure [wikipedia.org]? It's animal shit that we use to fertilize land on which we grow plants to eat. That has been done for ages.

Dogs that eat their own or other dog's shit probably lack Kalium. Feeding them bananas will compensate for this, and if you do this properly you can teach them not to eat shit by rewarding them with bananas. I've seen Cesar do this, and I know dogs like bananas.

Anybody who has spent any time on a farm can tell you that cows eat a lot of their own shit, literally. And I'm not talking about large, industrial farms either, I'm talking about free-range cattle. I remember once watching a cow grazing on some tall grass, while another cow was shitting all over the first one's head and of course the grass it was eating.Pigs are even worse, they eat damn near anything. Chickens are, too.

I'm not claiming what the article is talking about is safe. I'm saying that people need

Which is exactly the point. Besides which, fish eat crap naturally too. It's not like they are holding open their mouths and dumping it in. Almost all sea life lives by eating crap at least in part.

Also, people forget you arent eating the animals intestinal tract. You're eating the flesh, the muscle. It may be "feces" when it goes in, but to the fishes body it's just an energy source, and gets treated as such. Nutrients are extracted and they go to buildings/rebuilding muscle cells etc.

Yes, but salmonella doesn't only live in the digestive tract. If an animal that can be infected by salmonella eats an animal that can be infected by salmonella which in turn eats the shit of an animal that is one of the best incubators of salmonella, there's a problem. Most traditional food taboos reflect a dangerous infection vector....

The basic point of TFA is that many of the practices of Vietnamese fishermen have the potential to spread disease to Americans. Also, while the FDA inspects only 2.7% of imported food, 1380 loads of seafood from Vietnam have been rejected for "filth and salmonella" in the last five years.

Clearly it's because ancient people in the Middle East did a scientific study and discovered that shellfish hang around outside sewage plants, even though there weren't any such thing.

I mean this is clearly a long shot, but bear with me: they go off quickly when you haven't got a fridge and you live in the desert, which led to some random goat herder getting a dose of Dagon's revenge.

While Prawns are not Kosher according to Jewish Dietary laws (something about shell fish not having horns?...I dunno, anybody wanna clarify?), *ALL* seafood, (from prawns to sharks to sea cucumbers and what-have-you) is deemed Halal according to Islamic Dietary laws; heck the laws are *staked* in favour of sea food vs land meat; no ritual regarding sacrifice, no restrictions either. I can go to any fish serving place and eat their produce, no questions asked.

Under kosher law (bearing in mind there are some minor differences between branches of Judaism here) fish have the same favourable status as in Islam, but other seafood (anything in the water without fins and scales) does not. Like pig prohibition (common to Judaism and Islam today, common across the entire ME in ancient times) it's tempting to see a health benefit, whether that had anything to do with the origin of the taboo or not it probably has something to do with its continued strength. The seafood pr

Ok, first we had Mad Cow Disease, which proves fatal to humans if you get it. For those too young to remember, it was caused by "enriching" cow feed with ground up sheep offal in order to recicle the waste, increase the protein content of the feed and increase the profit to the farmer. This caused the bugs to get into the cows brains and turn them to mush. Called Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in the cow flavor, Kreutzfeld-Jakobs syndrome in human flavor, basically turns your brains into a bloody sponge full of holes, then you die inevitably, be it cow or human.

Wait for the upcoming Mad Fish Scare. Just remember every time your MacFish stick or burger tastes like shit.

Well, there is in fact a real threat here. A common parasite in fresh water fish in tropical countries is the liver fluke, a worm that lives part of its cycle in the human gut and is responsible, in cases, for cholangiocarcinoma, cancer of the bile duct. The worm attaches near the bile duct and produces chemicals that create cancer so it can eat the by-products. Nice little beast. It's a slow developing cancer that kills suddenly because it has no symptoms until it reaches a late stage. It's one of the commoner reasons for death among 50-year old males in countries where it's endemic.

One assumes there's more resistance in populations that have been exposed to this parasite for thousands of years. Women suffer much less from bile duct cancer than men, so there's variation in individual vulnerability. But as Chinese fish is exported, and ends up in places like cheap sushi bars in Birmingham, the parasite ends up in thousands, perhaps millions of people who have little resistance.

Attack of the Killer Sushi.

I should know, I got bile duct cancer a year or two ago and since there were no antecedents in my family, this seemed the most likely cause.

If we started feeding fish on pig feces, it's a slippery slope (sorry!) to feeding them human feces.

Good news is a yearly de-worming should be sufficient to prevent bile-duct cancer, if anyone cared about this.

First, my condolences regarding your diagnosis, I hope you are receiving proper care for your condition. However, I would like to offer some corrections and commentary on your post.

The worm attaches near the bile duct and produces chemicals that create cancer so it can eat the by-products.

The exact mechanism resulting in the increase in cholangiocarcinoma is not known with certainty, but is thought to involve the constant inflammation and irritation produced by the parasite's presence, which results in increased cellular proliferation and hyperplasia. To say it "produces chemicals that create cancer so it can ea

Thanks for the information... very useful. I wish I had mod points. Yes, my point is about fraudulent use of infected fresh water fish in cheaper sushi restaurants run by non-Japanese kitchens (which in my experience is common), combined with perhaps lower tolerance of western gene pools to the parasite's effects. Sorry if my description of its intentions were fuzzy; I'm basing it off articles like http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2009/10/how-a-liver-fluke-causes-cancer/ [smithsonianmag.com]. If there's an arms race, cle

The origins of cooking likely had little to do with disease; you don't start having the problems at the scales we see in modern times until you've had domestication and keep them in more confined areas than they'd have been in nature. (which is basically, all farming, not just the factory stuff).

The early advantage of cooking is that it although it may destroy some nutrients (hence the raw food movement), it makes others more available for human absorbtion, so there's a net gain. This is what's attributed to human's large brains -- they're rather costly in terms of energy, but cooking lets us spend less time eating for the same nutrients.

And I say this as someone who's not allowed to give blood, as I'm an increased likelihood of Mad Cow. And I should mention that just bringing to a boil isn't enough for some food borne illnesses (eg, botulism or other spores), particularly if you're at an elevation significantly above sea level.

"Ngoc Sinh has been certified as safe by Geneva-based food auditor SGS SA, says Nguyen Trung Thanh, the company’s general director.""SGS spokeswoman Jennifer Buckley says her company has no record of auditing Ngoc Sinh."

In other words, the article claims that Ngoc Sinh Seafoods Trading & Processing Export Enterprise is using repulsive and unsafe practices, and lying about having been inspected. Bloomberg is accusing them of a crime. The Slashdot headline, on the other hand, converted this into "Approved for Consumers" - accusing a different group, the regulators, which appear to be innocent.

Tilapia is just fish for people who don't like fish.It is bland, with hardly any taste. I prefer fish that actually tastes like, you know, fish.Feeding tilapia manure will probably increase its flavour.

It is bland, with hardly any taste. I prefer fish that actually tastes like, you know, fish.

Fish either tastes vaguely of sea water and piss (sea fish) or strongly of dirty rivers (river fish). Apart from the fact that no one minds killing fish but a lot of people get upset about killing lambs etc, there is no reason on god's earth ever to eat fish unless you're starving to death and there are no vegetables to hand.

Fish is generally eaten by people who don't really like eating at all. The only exceptions I can think of are: (1) tasty smoked kippers which taste of smoke and a bit of fish and (

Our oxygen is plant shit, the co2 is other peoples shit, your vegetables grow on shit, your meat eats shits, you cook it on farts, you walk on shit and some of us consider clothes made from shit to be the height of luxury.

It is a shitty world and it worse for those who believe in homeopathy.Water has memory? Oh good, so does it remember having been pissed out billions of times over the lifetime of the earth? And if water has memory, why doesn't it remember the time it was beer!

Our oxygen is plant shit, the co2 is other peoples shit, your vegetables grow on shit, your meat eats shits, you cook it on farts, you walk on shit and some of us consider clothes made from shit to be the height of luxury.

It is a shitty world and it worse for those who believe in homeopathy.Water has memory? Oh good, so does it remember having been pissed out billions of times over the lifetime of the earth? And if water has memory, why doesn't it remember the time it was beer!

The point isn't feces it's the fact they are planning to use raw sewage so the bacteria is the dangerous element. I think this once again brings up the question, why do we allow food imports from China!!!! Their standards are so low much of the food is potentially dangerous. Imported foods should always be held to the same standards as domestically produced foods. Better yet raise the food locally and create jobs and reduce oil consumption.

A few years ago on a whim I bought some generic branded local supermarket Stop & Shop seafood and came up with an upper body skin rash for a month. Later looked at the label and the stuff was made in China. Later found that there was a bunch of seafood enriched with some kind of a protein additive causing such bad allergic reactions to people that show up as an upper body skin rash just like I had. I had and still have no seafood allergies at the time and ate and still eat tons of seafood at restaurants weekly and sushi of all kinds, never have any bad results.

Last few weeks I tried to expand my home diet to include more seafood and looked at my new super market chain called Kroger and found that all of their generic fish was imported from China, including freezers full of tilapia and other fish. I could not find any non-generic seafood in this store that wasn't from China. Decided not to buy any this time around after I learned my lesson the last time. I had to travel to their competitor HEB to find some non-Chinese seafood and luckily found some Alaskan salmon at a hefty price.

I wish America would get it's shit together and wake the fuck up and stop importing food from China because of the horrible abuses of the environment that that country is perpetrating in the name of capitalism and profit and complete disregard for environmental and human safety as long as their shit infested products sell.

China will cut its own dick off in the name of profit and sell it to anyone willing to buy a small fried spring roll.

An international group of ecologists and economists warned yesterday that the world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates, based on a four-year study of catch data and the effects of fisheries collapses.

If your an actual fisherman you will know that yes there are a lot less fish out there now then there was 10 years ago and even less than 20 years ago.

I can remember fishing for flounder with coat hangers, treble hooks, and weights. you would throw it into the surf and just drag it back snagging them. We could catch all we want any time. Now you go out and are lucky to get one or two in a full days fishing.

We have been extremely irresponsible in how we have managed fish popul

The U.S. govt. has always permitted small amounts of bone and rat feces in meat products sold. Yep, rat feces. And bone gets purposely ground up and added into hamburger meat. It's a trade-off between the convience of store bought or having to go out and kill my own food myself, then I have to spit out any errant buckshot.

The U.S. govt. has always permitted small amounts of bone and rat feces in meat products sold. Yep, rat feces. And bone gets purposely ground up and added into hamburger meat. It's a trade-off between the convience of store bought or having to go out and kill my own food myself, then I have to spit out any errant buckshot.

Really? I just pull the arrow out. (unless it passed right through).

You must be Herne the mighty motherfucking Hunter if you can fire an arrow all the way through a cow.

Your seafood's always been eating fish shit. Your vegetables are grown in shit. I'm sorry this is a shock to people.

And virtually all, if not all, tilapia is raised on fish feces. In fact, that's the *entire* reason it became marketed -- they were used to clean the fish farm tanks that other fish were being raised in and someone got the idea to sell them, too! Twice the fish for the amount of feed!

If you're right - and it sounds plausible - then tilapia is the most guilt-free fish that you can get in the supermarket. Not only does it consume resources that would otherwise be wasted; it actually provides an environmental service as well. Now also feeding them pig shit, that's disgusting. However, all the dangers mentioned sound merely potential. Can salmonella, for example, be transmitted through frozen tilapia to humans? Has anyone been actually harmed by pigshit tilapia? If the tilapia is a wonderou

It's possible that there are specific problems in this case (someone else on the thread mentioned liver flukes being a danger), but the general "oh no, they're growing things with shit!" reaction is silly. People who buy organic produce pay a premium to have their food grown using shit, a.k.a. "natural fertilizers." Either it's the more obvious kind (farm animal or similar manure), or it's compost -- which is just worm and bacteria manure from digesting plant matter, mixed with the bits that didn't get eate

As several posters have commented, this isn't that uncommon in nature, and its certainly not uncommon in commercial meat industries (as "mad cow" reminds us). But the point no one has made yet is that the excrement based feed replaces commercial harvesting for "fishmeal". Wikipedia defines this as:

"Fishmeal can be made from almost any type of seafood but is generally manufactured from wild-caught, small marine fish that contain a high percentage of bones and oil, and is usually deemed not suitable for d

How dare they feed this shit to fish. If this shit was approved for consumers, then we consumers should get to eat it, not some lousy fish! I expect PETA is behind this making sure the carp get the crap instead of us!

I once worked for a guy who had "ESAD" printed in the lower left of his business card (he had, you might say... anger issues). Had to ask him what it meant, he told me, but that he tells his customers that it's an acronym for, "Excellent Service And Dependability". But that's not what you meant, huh?:-)